He uses tactile switches instead of dropping coins in a slot, and a lever-style switch sets the one-armed bandit in motion. The action is displayed on a 1.5″ µOLED-128-G1 screen that has its own controller (which explains how this operates so well with the relatively slow BS2). For realism there’s some pretty good sound effects provided by a piezo speaker. We’ll look at the code, graphics, and some video after the break.

The connections are quite simple and [Mike] has built the project on the Basic Stamp 2 Homework Board. The display is addressed through two serial lines and a reset pin.

He generated the graphics using MSpaint, creating three full screen images that rarely change. The icons for the spinning dials are much smaller and overlayed on top of the larger images. Three of these icons are stored next to each other in memory. That way, a pointer can be advanced and the next image will start to scroll in, resembling a spinning cylinder. Here’s a bit larger version of the schematic and images if you need it.

For that reason I have always found these screens overpriced. Sure, they have an easy to use interface, but there is so much example code and it’s so easy to work with more basic screens that you might as well just develop your own code optimised for the types of things you want to do.

Machines are for fools. The machines that look like live games do not have the same physics, the animations are just to trick people. For example, the video BJ games are allowed to shuffle after every hand.

Stick to live table games without continuous shufflers and learn to count cards on BJ, clock the wheel on European Roulette and play poker on live games.

In defense of the uOLED-128: it scrolls much smoother if the sound commands are removed (due to the single-thread limitation of the BS2),there is microSD support on the display, it can be had for $65 from Parallax, and the color intensity is impressive. Thanks for the caution about blue useage, Fallen. Thanks for the comments, all.

Ummm
Good project, was thinking about doing something like this myself. Ended up on the ‘back burners’.
Just one thing Hackaday – Basic Stamp isn’t the first thing I think of when I read BS in the title!
Made me think this was a bit bogus!